Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam objectives
Cloud Native Computing Foundation publishes 5 exam domains with official weightings. The weight tells you where your marks come from — study time should roughly follow it.
CKADAdvanced
1. Application Environment, Configuration and Security
25%- ConfigMaps and Secrets — as environment variables and as mounted volumes
- SecurityContext: runAsUser, capabilities, and read-only root filesystems
- Resource requests and limits, and the QoS class they produce
- ServiceAccounts, RBAC from the workload's side, and CRDs
2. Application Design and Build
20%- Pod design: init containers, sidecars, and multi-container patterns
- Jobs and CronJobs, including completions, parallelism and failure handling
- Volumes — emptyDir, PersistentVolumeClaims, and when each fits
- Building and referencing container images correctly
3. Application Deployment
20%- Deployments: rolling updates, rollbacks and revision history
- Blue/green and canary approaches expressed in Kubernetes primitives
- Helm basics — installing and templating a chart
- Kustomize overlays for environment differences
4. Services and Networking
20%- Services and how selectors bind them to pods
- Ingress rules for HTTP routing
- NetworkPolicy for ingress and egress isolation
- Debugging why a service has no endpoints
5. Application Observability and Maintenance
15%- Liveness, readiness and startup probes — and the failure each prevents
- Reading logs and events to locate a fault fast
- kubectl debug and ephemeral containers
- Understanding the API deprecation cycle
Our practice exam distributes its questions across these exact domains at these weightings — so your score per domain tells you precisely where you stand.
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